"No, thank you."

"You'll surely have a taste?"

"Ah, no--"

"Just a drop...."

Their eyes met. He was peering into her face so that he could be sure she was looking at him, and somehow the grimace seemed to be promising her infinite pleasure.

She muttered, "Well, just a drop!" and found herself laughing unhappily.

He pa.s.sed her his gla.s.s.

"But what," she asked in dismay, "will you drink from?"

Almost irritably he clicked his tongue, though he still smiled. "Drink it up! Drink it up!"

She raised the gla.s.s to her lips and set her head back that the sin might have swift progress, expecting the loveliest thing, like an ice, but warm and very worldly; and informed with solemn pleasure too, for such colours are spilt on marble floors when the sun sets behind cathedral windows, such colours come into the mind when great music is played or some deep voice speaks Shakespeare....

"Ach!" she screamed, and banged the gla.s.s down on the table. "It's horrid! It draws the mouth!" She started up and stood rubbing her knuckles into her cheeks and twisting her lips. She had never thought wine was like this. It was not so much a drink as a blow in the mouth.

And yet somehow she felt ashamed of not liking it. "The matron at school used to give us something for toothache that was as bad as this!" she said peevishly, and tears stood in her eyes.

Mr. Philip stood up, laughing. The crisis of his pleasure in persuading her to do the thing which she hadn't wanted to do was his joy that she hadn't liked it when she had done it. And suddenly one of the walls of the neat mental chamber in which he customarily stood fell in; by the light that streamed in upon him he perceived that his ecstasy was only just beginning. At last he knew what he wanted to do. With gusto he marked that Ellen too was conscious that the incident was not at its close, for she was still wringing her hands, though the taste of the wine must long have gone from her mouth, and was stammering miserably, "Well, if yon stuff's a temptation to any poor folk--!" Again he felt that their relationship was on a proper footing; he moved towards her, walking masterfully. Oh, it was going to be ecstasy.... There was a loud knocking at the outer door.

III

She forgot all about the wine at once, he was so very big. And he looked as though he had gold rings in his ears, although he hadn't; it was just part of his sea-going air.

He looked at her very hard and said as though it hardly mattered, "I want to see Mr. James. My name's Yaverland."

"Will you step inside?" said Ellen, with her best English accent. "Mr.

Philip's expecting you." She was glad he had come, for he looked interesting, but she hoped he would not interrupt her warm comfortable occupation of mothering Mr. Philip. To keep that mood aglow in herself she stopped as they went along the pa.s.sage and begged, "You'll not make him miss his train? He's away to London to-night. He should leave here on the very clap of eight."

The stranger seemed, after a moment's silence, of which, since they stood in darkness, she could not read the cause, to lay aside a customary indifference for the sake of the gravity of the occasion. "Oh, certainly; he shall leave on the very clap of eight," he replied earnestly.

He spoke without an accent and was most romantically dark. Ellen wondered whether Mr. Philip would like him--she had noticed that Mr.

Philip didn't seem to fancy people who were very tall. And she perceived with consternation as they entered the room that he had suddenly been overtaken by one of his moods. He had taken up the tray and was trying to slip it into the cupboard, which he might have seen would never hold it, and in any case was a queer place for a tray, and stood there with it in his hands, brick-red and glowering at them. She was going to take it from him when he dunted it down on the window-seat with a clatter.

"What for can he not go on with his good chop?" thought Ellen. "We're putting on grand company manners for this bit chemist body, surely," and she pulled forward a chair for the stranger and sat down in the corner with her note-book on her knee.

"You're Mr. Yaverland?" said Mr. Philip, shooting his chin forward and squaring his shoulders, and looking as though his father were dead and he were the head of the firm.

"I'm Richard Yaverland. Mr. Frank Gibson said you might be good enough to see to my affairs for me. I've got a letter from him...."

Decidedly the man had an air. He slid the letter across the table as if he did not care in the least whether anybody ever picked it up and retreated into a courteous inattention. She felt a little cross at Mr.

Philip for not showing that Edinburgh too understands the art of arrogance, for opening the letter so clumsily and omitting to say the nice friendly thing. Well, if he was put about it was his own fault for not going on with the chop, it being well known to all educated persons that one cannot work on an empty stomach. If this man would go soon she would run down to Mrs. Powell and get her to heat up the chop again. She eyed him anxiously to see if he looked the kind of person who left when one wanted him to, and found herself liking him for the way he slouched in his chair, as though he wanted to mitigate as much as possible his terrifying strength and immensity. What for did a fine man like him help to make cordite, the material of militarism, which is the curse of the nations? She wished he could have heard R.J. Campbell speak on peace the other night at the Synod Hall; it was fine. But probably he was a Conservative, for these big men were often unprogressive. She examined him carefully out of the corner of her eye to estimate the chances of his being brought into the fold of reform by properly selected oratory.

That at least was the character of contemplation she intended, but though she was so young that she believed the enjoyment of any sensory impression sheer waste unless it was popped into the mental stockpot and made the basis of some sustaining moral soup, she found herself just looking at him. His black hair lay in streaks and rings on his rain-wet forehead and gave him an abandoned and magical air, like the ghost of a drowned man risen for revelry; his dark gold skin told a traveller's tale of far-off pleasurable weather; and the bare hand that lay on his knee was patterned like a snake's belly with brown marks, doubtless the stains of his occupation; and his face was marked with an expression that it vexed her she could not put a name to, for if at her age she could not read human nature like a book she never would. It was not hunger, for it was serene, and it was not greed, for it was austere, and yet it certainly signified that he habitually made upon life some urgent demand that was not wholly intellectual and that had not been wholly satisfied. As she wondered a slight retraction of his chin and a drooping of his heavy eyelids warned her, by their likeness to the controlled but embarra.s.sed movements of a highly-bred animal approached by a stranger, that he knew she was watching him, and she took her gaze away. But she had to look again, just to confirm her feeling that however fanciful she might be about him his appearance would always give some further food for her imagination; and presently, for though she was the least vain person in the world she was the most egotistical, began to compare the large correctness of his features with the less academic spontaneity of her own. "Lord! Why has everybody but me got a straight nose!" she exclaimed to herself. "But it's all blethers to think that an indented chin means character. How can a dunt in your bone have anything to do with your mind?" She rubbed her own chin, which was a little white ball, and pushed it forward, glowering at his great jaw. Then her examination ended. She noticed that all over his upper lip and chin there was a faint bluish bloom, as if he had shaved closely and recently but the strong hair was already pressing through again. That disgusted her, although she reminded herself that he could not help it, that that was the way he was made. "There's something awful like an animal about a man," she thought, and shivered.

"Och, aye!" said Mr. Philip, which was a sure sign that he was upset, for in business he reckoned to say "Yes, yes." The two men began by exchange of politenesses about Mr. Frank Gibson, to whom they referred in the impersonal way of business conversations as though he were some well-known brand of integrity, and then proceeded to divest the property in Rio de Janeiro of all interest in a like manner. It was a house, it appeared, and was at present let to an American named Capel on a five years' lease, which had nearly expired. There was no likelihood of Capel requiring any extension of this lease, for he was going back to the States. So now Yaverland wanted to sell it. There ought to be no trouble in finding a buyer, for it was a famous house. "Everybody in Rio knows the Villa Miraflores," he said. She gasped at the name and wrote it in longhand; to compress such deliciousness into shorthand would have been sacrilege. After that she listened more eagerly to his voice, which she perceived was charged with suppressed magic as it might have been with suppressed laughter. The merry find no more difficulty in keeping a straight face than he found in using the flat phrase. And as she gleefully gazed at him, recognising in him her sort of person, his speech slipped the business leash. There were hedges of geranium and poinsettia about the villa, pergolas hung with bougainvillea, numberless palms, and a very pleasant orange grove in good bearing; in the courtyard a bronze Venus rode on a sprouting whale, and there were many fountains; and within there was much white marble and pillars of precious stone, and horrible liverish Viennese mosaics, for the house was something of a prodigy, having been built in a trade boom by a _rastaqouere_. "Mhm," said Mr. Philip sagaciously, and from the funeral slide of respect in his voice Ellen guessed that he imagined _rastaqouere_ to be a Brazilian variety of Lord Provost. She would have laughed had there not been the plainest intimation that he was still upset about something in his question whether Yaverland thought he would be well advised to sell the house, whether he had any reasonable expectation of recovering the capital he had sunk in it; for she had noticed that whenever Mr. Philip felt miserable he was wont to try and cheer himself by suggesting that somebody had been "done."

But that worry was dissolved by the enchantment of Yaverland's answer.

He hadn't the slightest idea what he had paid for the villa. It happened this way. He had won a lot of money at poker ("Tchk! Tchk!" said Mr.

Philip, half shocked, but showing by the way he put one thumb in his waistcoat arm-hole that he was so far sensible of the change in the atmosphere that he felt the need of some romantic gesture), and had felt no shame in pocketing it since it came from a man who was gambling to try to show that he wasn't a Jew. Ellen hated him for that. She believed in absolute racial equality, and sometimes intended to marry a Hindu as a propagandist measure. And then he had remembered that a friend of his, de Cayagun of the Villa Miraflores, was broke and wanted to move. Even Rio was tired of poor de Cayagun, though he'd given it plenty of fun.

There had been great times at the villa. His phrases, which seemed to have scent and colour as well as meaning, made her see red pools of wine on the marble floor and rose wreaths about the bronze whale's snout, and hear from the orange grove the sound of harps, yet from a sullenness in his faint smile she deduced there had been something dark in this delight. Perhaps somebody had got drunk. But he was saying now that that time had come to an end long before the night when he had won this money from Demetrios. De Cayagun had no more jewels to give away and even the servants had all left him.... She saw night invading the villa like a sickness of the light, the pools of wine lying black on marble that the dusk had made blue like cold flesh; and this stranger standing white-faced in the stripped banquet-hall, with the broken body of the Venus on a bier at his feet and above his head the creaking wings of birds come to establish desolation under the shattered roof. Why was he so sad because some people who were members of the parasite cla.s.s and were probably devoid of all political idealism had had to stop having a good time? It was, she supposed, that ethereal abstract sorrow, undimmed by personal misery and unconfined by the syllogisms of moral judgment, that poets feel: that Milton had felt when he wrote "Comus" about somebody for whom he probably wouldn't have mixed a toddy, that she herself had often felt when the evening star shone its small perfect crescent above the funeral flame of the day. People would call it a piece of play-acting nonsense just because of its purity and their inveterate peering liking for personal emotion, which they seemed to honour according to its intensity even if that intensity progressed towards the disagreeable. She remembered how the neighbours had all respected Mrs. Ball in the house next door for the terrific manifestations of her abandonment to the grief of widowhood. "t.i.ts, t.i.ts, puir body!" they had said with zestful reverence, and yet the woman had been behaving exactly as if she was seasick. She preferred the impersonal pang. It was right. Right as the furniture in the Chambers Museum was, as the clothes in Redfern's window in Princes Street were, as this stranger was. And it had a high meaning too. It was evoked by the end of things, by sunsets, by death, by silence, following song; by intimations that no motion is perpetual and that death is a part of the cosmic process. It had the sacred quality of any recognition of the truth....

Well, he was telling them how he had gone up to de Cayagun, and they had knocked up a notary and made him draft a deed of sale, which he had posted to his agents without reading. He had only the vaguest idea how much money had changed hands. Mr. Philip shook his head and chuckled knowingly, "Well, Mr. Yaverland, that is not how we do business in Scotland," and suggested that it might be wise to retain some part of the property: the orange grove, for instance. At that Yaverland was silent for a moment, and then replied with an august, sweet-tempered insolence that he couldn't see why he should, since he wasn't a marmalade fancier. "Besides, that's an impossible proposition. It's like selling a suburban villa and retaining an interest in the geranium bed...." In the warm, interesting atmosphere she detected an intimation of enmity between the two men; and it was like catching a caraway seed under a tooth while one was eating a good cake. She was disturbed and wanted to intervene, to warn the stranger that he made Mr. Philip dizzy by talking like that. And the reflection came to her that it would be sweet, too, to tell him that he could talk like that to her for ever, that he could go on as he was doing, being much more what one expected of an opera than a client, and she would follow him all the way. But it struck her suddenly and chillingly that she had no reason to suppose that he would be interested. His talk was in the nature of a monologue.

He showed no sign of desiring any human companionship.

Still, he was wonderful. She did not take it as warning of any coldness or unkindness in him that it was impossible to imagine him linked by a human relationship to any ordinary person like herself; there are pictures too fine for private ownership. Just then he was being particularly fine in an exciting way. He sat up very straight, flung out his great arm with a gesture of abandonment, and said that he would have no more to do with this house. So might a conqueror speak of a city he was weary of looting. He wanted to sell it outright, and desired Mr.

Philip to undertake the whole business of concluding the sale with the Rio agents. "It's all here," he said, and took from his pocket-book a packet of letters. "They hold the t.i.tle-deeds and you'll see how things are getting on with the deal. But I suppose the language will be a difficulty. I can read you these, of course, but how will you carry on the correspondence?"

"Och, we can send out to a translator--"

A tingling ran through Ellen's veins. The men's words, uttered on one side in irritated languor and on the other with empty spruceness, had suddenly lifted her to the threshold of life. She had previsioned many moments in which she should disclose her unique value to a dazzled world, but most of them had seemed, even to herself, extremely unlikely to arrive. It was improbable that Mr. Asquith should fall into a river just as she was pa.s.sing, and that he should be so helpless and the countryside so depopulated that she would be able to exact votes for women as the price of his rescue; besides, she could not swim. It was improbable, too, that she should be in a South American republic just when a revolution was proclaimed, and that, the Latin att.i.tude to women being what it is, she should be given a high military command. But there had been one triumph which she knew to be not impossible even in her obscurity. It might conceivably happen that by some exhibition of the prodigious bloom of her efficiency she would repay her debt to the firm and make the first steps towards becoming the pioneer business queen.

For it was one of her dreams, perhaps the six hundred and seventy-ninth in the series, that one day she would sit at a desk answering innumerable telephone calls with projecting jaw, as millionaires do on the movies, and crushing rivals like blackbeetles in order that, after being reviled by the foolish as a heartless plutocrat, she might hand a gigantic Trust over to the Socialist State.

"Mr. Philip," she said.

Apparently he did not hear her, though the other man turned his dark glance on her.

"Mr. Philip," she said. He looked across at her with a blankness she took as part of the business. "I've been taking Commercial Spanish at Skerry's. I took a first-cla.s.s certificate. Maybe I could manage the letters?"

"Oh!" exclaimed Yaverland explosively. He appeared to be about to make some objection, and then he bit back the speech that was already in his mouth. And as he tried to find other words the beauty of her body caught his attention. It was, as it happened, very visible at that moment. The fulness of her overall had fallen to one side as she sat on the high stool, and so that linen was tightly wrapped about her, disclosing that she was made like a delicate fleet beast; in the valley between her high small b.r.e.a.s.t.s there lay a shadow, which grew greater when she breathed deeply. He looked at her with the dispa.s.sionateness which comes to men who have lived much in countries where nakedness offers itself unashamed to the sunlight, and said to himself, "I should like to see her run." He knew that a body like this must possess an infinite capacity for physical pleasure, that to her mere walking would give more joy than others find in dancing. And then he raised his eyes to her face and was sad. For sufficient reasons he was very sensitive to the tragedies of women, and he knew it was a tragedy that such a face should surmount such a body. For her body would imprison her in soft places: she would be allowed no adventures other than love, no achievements other than births. But her face was haggard, in spite of its youth, with appet.i.te for travel in the hard places of the world, for the adventures and achievements that are the birthright of any man. "It's rotten luck to be a girl," he thought. "If she were a boy I could get her a job at Rio....

Lord, she has lovely hair!" He perceived sharply that he was not likely to be of any more use to her than most men would. All he could do would be to avert the humiliation which the moment seemed likely to bring down on her.

"Oh, this is a wonderful country," he said aloud, "where you get people studying Spanish in their off-hours." Ellen thought it rather wonderful too, and looked at her toes with a priggish blankness. "You've got a marvellous educational system...." He paused, conscious that he was too manifestly talking at random. "In two continents you've enjoyed the reputation of being able to talk the hind-leg off a donkey," he reminded himself. "It's the language to learn," he said aloud. "It's the language of the future. Ever been in Spain, Mr. James?"

"No," said Mr. Philip, "but I was thinking of going there--or mebbe Italy--ma Easter holidays." Ellen smiled brilliantly at him, for she knew that he had had no such thought till that evening's talk with her; she had converted him to a romantic. He caught her eye, only to glare coldly into the centre of her smile.

It was Yaverland's opportunity, for he had spent two years as chemist at the Romanones mines in Andalusia; and he had learned by now the art of talking to the Scotch, whom he had discovered to be as extravagantly literate as they were unsensuous. To them panpipes might play in vain, but almost any series of statistics or the more desiccated kind of social fact recited with a terrier-like air of sagacity would entrance them. "The mines are Baird's, you know--Sir Milne Baird; it's a Glasgow firm...." "Mhm," said Mr. Philip, "I know who you mean." Detestable, thought Yaverland, this Scotch locution which implies that one has made a vague or incorrect description which only the phenomenal intelligence of one's listener has enabled him to penetrate, but he set himself suavely enough to describe the instability of Spanish labour, its disposition to call strikes that were really larks, and the greater willingness with which it keeps its saints' days rather than the commandments; the f.e.c.kless incapacity of the Spanish to exploit their own minerals and the evangelic part played in the shameful shoes by Scotch engineers; and the depleted state of the country in general, which he was careful to ascribe not so much to the presence of Catholicism as to the absence of Presbyterianism. And he advised Mr.

Philip that while a sojourn in the towns would reveal these sad political conditions, there were other deplorable aspects of the national decay which could only be witnessed if he took a few rides over the countryside. ("A horse or a bicycle?" asked Mr. Philip doubtfully.) Then he would have a pleasant holiday. The language presented few difficulties, although travelling off the tracks in Andalusia was sometimes impeded by the linguistic ingenuity of the peasants, who, though they didn't neigh and whinny like the Castilians, went one better by omitting the consonants. Why, there was a place which spelt itself AlG.o.donales on the map and calls itself Aooae.

He watched her under his lids as she silently tried it over.

It was a village of no importance, save for the road that close by forded the Guadalete, which was a pale icy mountain stream, snow-broth, as Shakespeare said. (Now what had he said to excite her so? Modesty and a sense of office discipline were restraining some eager cry of her mind, like white hands holding birds resolved on flight.) One pa.s.sed through it on a ride that Mr. Philip must certainly take when he went to Spain. Yaverland himself had done it last February. He receded into a dream of that springtime, yet kept his consciousness of the girl's rapt attention, as one may clasp the warm hand of a friend while one thinks deeply, and he sent his voice out to Mr. Philip as into a void, describing how he had gone to Seville one saint's day and how the narrow decaying streets, choked with loveliness like stagnant ditches filled with a fair weed, had entertained him. For a time he had sat in the Moorish courts of the Alcazar; he had visited the House of Pontius Pilate and had watched through the carven windows the two stone women that pray for ever among the flowers in the courtyard; he had lingered by the market-stalls observing their exquisite, unprofitable trade. He was telling not half the beauty that he recollected, save in a phrase that he now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appet.i.te for such things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak, advertis.e.m.e.nt matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for G.o.d knows what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have cheap clocks and crockery and Austrian gla.s.s, they had stacks of violets and carnations--_violetas y claveles_...." Then a chill and a dimness pa.s.sed over the bright spectacle and a sunset flamed up half across the sky as though light had been driven out of the gates by the sword and had scaled the heaven that it might storm the city from above. The lanes became little runnels of darkness and night slowly silted up the broader streets. The incessant orgy of sound that by day had been but the tuneless rattling of healthy throats and the chatter of castanets became charged with tragedy by its pa.s.sage through the grave twilight. The people pressed about him like vivacious ghosts, differentiating themselves from the dusk by wearing white flowers in their hair or cherishing the glow-worm tip of a cigarette between their lips.

He remembered it very well. For that was a night that the torment of loneliness had rushed in upon him, an experience of the pain that had revisited him so often that a little more and he would be reconciled to the idea of death. Even then he had been intelligent about the mood and had known that his was not a loneliness that could be exorcised by any of the beautiful brown bodies which here professed the arts of love and the dance and that drunkenness which would bring a physical misery to match his mental state. Though this was wisdom, it added to his sense of being lost in black s.p.a.ce like a wandering star. In the end he had gone into a cafe and drunk manzanilla, and with the limp complaisance of a wrecked seasick man whose raft has shivered and left him to the mercy of an octopus he had suffered adoption by a party of German engineers, who had made very merry with stories of tipsy priests and nuns who had not lived up to their position as the brides of Christ. Dismal night, forerunner of a hundred such. "Oh, G.o.d, what is the use of it all? I sit here yarning to this d.a.m.ned little dwarf of a solicitor and this girl who is sick to go to these countries from which I've come back cold and famined...."

But he went on, since the occasion seemed to demand it, giving a gay account of the beauty which he remembered so intensely because it had framed his agony; how the next day, under a sky that was temporarily pale and amiable because this was early spring, he had ridden down the long road between the brown heathy pastures to the blue barren downland that lies under the black mountains, and had come at last to a winding path that led not only through s.p.a.ce but through time, for it ran nimbly in and out among the seasons. It travelled under the rosy eaves of a forest of blossoming almond up to a steep as haggard with weather as a Scotch moor, and dipped again to hedges of aloes and cactus and asphodel. At one moment a spindrift of orange blossom blew about him; at another he had watched the peasants in their brown capes stripping their dark green orange-groves and piling the golden globes into the panniers of donkeys which were gay with magenta ta.s.sels. At one time there was trouble getting the horse up the icy trail, yet a little later it was treading down the irises and jonquils and bending its head to snuff the rosemary. So on, beauty all the way, and infinitely variable, all the many days' journey to the coast, where the mountain drops suddenly to the surf and reflects the Mediterranean sky as a purple glamour on its snowy crest. Ah, such a country!

He meant to go at that, for his listeners were now like honey-drugged bees: to toss his papers on the table, go out, and let the situation settle itself after his departure. But Mr. Philip said, "But surely they're crool. Bullfights and that--"

He could not let that pa.s.s. "You don't understand. It's different over there."

"Surely right's right and wrong's wrong, wherever you are?" said Mr.

Philip.

"No. Spain's a place, as I said, where one travels in time as well as in s.p.a.ce...." He didn't himself agree that the bullfight was so much crueller than most organised activities of men. From the bull's point of view, indeed, it was a n.o.bler way of becoming roast beef than any other and gave him the chance of drawing blood for blood; and the toreador's life was good, as all dangerous lives are. But of course there were the horses; he shuddered at his unspoken memory of a horse stumbling from the arena at Seville with a riven belly and hanging entrails that gleamed like mother-o'-pearl. Oh, yes, he admitted, it was cruel; or, rather, would be if it were committed by a people like ourselves. But it wasn't. That was the point he wanted to make. When one travelled far back in time. It was hard for us--"for you, especially," he amplified, with a courteous, enthusiastic flinging out of his hand, "with your unparalleled Scotch system of education"--to comprehend the mentality of a people which had been prevented, by the economic insanity of its governors and the determination of the Church to sit on its intelligence till it stopped kicking, from growing up. Among the things it hadn't attained to was the easy anthropocentric att.i.tude that is part of our civilisation.